Impacts of Houseshold Registration System Reform on Chinese Manufacturing Industrial

Impacts of Houseshold registration system reform on Chinese manufacturing industrial agglomeration

Relevance of the topic and research goals

Industrial agglomeration, initially proposed by Alfred Marshall, refers to the advantages that firms producing similar goods can attain by locating closer to each other (Fujita, 2002). The premise of industrial agglomeration economy is free market. However, China’s hukou (household registration) system limited labor mobility between rural and urban areas, between provinces. Restricted labor pool accessibility makes the region less attractive to firms and weakens the benefits exerted from industrial agglomeration in the region.

Statement of the problem

This study aims to investigate impacts of registration system policy reform on industrial agglomeration in Chinese manufacturing industries. The main hypothesis is that the policy reform will have positive impacts on industrial agglomeration. The premise of the study is to test the existence of industrial agglomeration and to measure the level of

Chinese manufacturing industry.

Data and methodology

Data: This research employs the 2004 and 2008 Chinese Economic Census Yearbook, which represents 5,169,037 and

7,099,242 number of legal persons respectively. Method: The research will estimate the Moran’s I to investigate the spatial pattern of Chinese manufacturing industries. Also, this study would calculate the spatial gini and Ellison-Glaeser

Index at the two digit industrial code levels.

Expected results and implications

This study calculated the Moran’s I index for Chinese manufacturing industries to explore the spatial patterns. spatial gini index for 31 2-digit manufacturing industries in 2004 and 2008. The spatial gini will serve as dependent variables later to test the impacts of registration policy reform in the second behalf of the study.

Reference

Chinitz. (2003). Contrasts in agglomeration: New York and Pittsburgh. Analysis of Urban Problems, 279-289.

Fujita. (2002). Economies of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth. Cambridge University Press.

Lu and Tao. (2009). Trends and determinants of China's industrial agglomeration. Journal of Urban Economics, 167-180.

Porter. (2001). The Determinants of National Innovative Capacity. Research policy, 899-933.